African American Ghettos

This investigation will be evaluating the origins of the ghetto and how the ghetto itself has helped to enforce racism within America. The rise of the ghetto has been associated predominantly within the black community, with origins from the late 1920’s. Evaluating the reasons for neighborhood segregation in the 1920’s is important because it shows an increased hostility towards blacks from whites, which further escalates at the beginning of the 1940’s. Looking at the time from the 1910-1920’s is important because it shows a spike in the correlation between increased racism and neighborhood segregation. From 1910 to 1920 there was a large influx of African Americans beginning to move to Northern cities. As more blacks began to fill up Northern
The Great Depression also helped to create a better divide in the housing between blacks and whites. At the federal, state, and local segregation through housing development was prevalent. To see an example of the correlation between racism and the rise of the African American ghettos this investigation will look into the New Deal’s policy on public housing. Public Housing was created with specific racial barriers in which housing works were to be used to house only people of the same race. Another way in which the New Deal ostracized African Americans was through Federal Housing Administration Loans. The Federal Housing Administration was founded in 1934, and created a legally accepted way to separate whites and blacks by neighborhoods. FHA loans gave builders loans at low interest rates for banks on the condition that no homes would be sold out to African Americans. Subdivisions and suburbs were now being built with the priority placed on whites. Blacks were pushed to the inner cities as white-flight increased. The idea of racial segregation in the neighborhoods, especially in the North was favored as a way to keep white purity. Aside from FHA loans restrictive covenants also made it possible to hold back African Americans into a certain community. Restrictive covenants came about as early as 1910. Baltimore, Maryland was the first city to
The Federal Housing Administration, created one of the earliest, and arguably most significant policy of legalized racism: the civilian public housing program which instituted segregation back into integrated neighborhoods. These housing policies themselves began to take on a greater significance by the late 1940’s and onward. In 1947 Wallace Stegner attempted to build houses through a cooperative. It allowed three African-Americans to become members of the cooperative showing an attempt to integrate housing opportunities. The cooperative did not however succeed because the FHA refused to insure or provide construction help to any of the members, because there were three black members. Even as some whites began to take a stance against de facto segregation, de jure segregation still set in place “legal” methods to keep blacks inferior to whites. The government furthered the segregation of housing through business zoning laws. African American neighborhoods were specifically zoned for industrial plants and waste disposal sites causing these areas to become deplorable. The government offered no relief, allowing black neighborhoods that once thrived to become slums. These areas hurt by racist government policy could not regain the immense equity that was lost, and as a result ghettos are still set in place today and black wealth is within 5 percent of their